


The Long Way Around

by ladygray99



Series: The Edge [6]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Cunnilingus, F/M, Foot rubs, Oral Sex, ninja!dom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:53:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/540151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygray99/pseuds/ladygray99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha would never submit, and she doesn’t understand why everyone else is, but she’s still waiting for Bruce to bring out his best lines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Way Around

Natasha watched as Bruce sipped his tea in their communal kitchen and flipped through the morning paper. He seemed rumpled and yet he wasn’t. His blue button-down shirt was freshly pressed as were his pants. His hair was washed and looked like there might even be a little product in it. His glasses were perched carefully on his nose, yet something about him seemed rumpled. If Natasha believed in such things she’d say Bruce had a rumpled aura.

She slid her cup under the over-engineered Stark coffee machine, and received a perfect cup of coffee without uttering a word. She took her own seat at the far end of the table and examined Bruce as if she could ferret out the answers she wanted just by staring at him long enough.

When he had hooked up with Stark, she hadn’t been entirely surprised. They were science nerds together, and Pepper traveled often. She simply braced herself for the fallout of Pepper finding out. Instead, she watched Bruce casually step out of Tony and Pepper’s bedroom one morning followed by Tony and Pepper a few minutes later both looking smug and satisfied. She hadn’t really expected that, but then Bruce was inherently likeable by just about anyone who wasn’t terrified of him.

Natasha had chalked it up as a modern polyamorous relationship until she noticed Bruce give Steve a hard hot look after dinner one night. She had followed and watched Steve go down to Bruce’s floor. Bruce emerged the next day looking cool and relaxed. Steve looked like he’d been ridden hard and put away wet, but also smiled to himself in a strange way when he thought no one was looking. She waited for the jealous spat between Tony, Pepper, Steve, and Bruce, but it never came.

When she realized Bruce had designs on Clint - apparently he was working his way through the Avengers - it was only the knowledge of what Bruce could become that kept her from punching him right in the nose. She talked to Clint instead, who assured her that even when he came out looking ragged with a tear streaked face, he really was fine. And the thing that got to Natasha was that he did seem fine. He seemed relaxed and comfortable in his own skin for the first time in months.

That’s when Natasha decided to figure out exactly what Bruce was doing. It had to be more than just fucking, and it was. They were submitting. Every one of them, people who Natasha would have argued didn’t have a submissive bone in their bodies, were submitting to the most dangerous man on the eastern seaboard.

The day she caught Thor drinking his morning coffee in his boxers and absolutely reeking of sex, Natasha just rolled her eyes and waited. Waited for the pickup line, the look - the whatever it was that was getting Bruce into everyone’s bed and everyone at Bruce’s feet. It never came. Some part of Natasha actually felt a little insulted. It would never happen, but she wasn’t exactly unattractive.

Bruce looked up at her from his tea then looked around. “Is everything okay?” He looked concerned and definitely rumpled.

“Just trying to figure some things out.”

“Like?”

Natasha squinted at him. “Like how you’ve managed to convince everyone in this tower that they want to get down on their knees and naked in front of you.”

Bruce sipped his tea and gave a shy little shrug that Natasha didn’t buy for a second. “I’m just good at reading people. Side effect of a crappy childhood and being on the run. I can work out what people want and what people need. Sometimes before they do. I just give it to them.” He shrugged again.

“No. I don’t believe that. Okay, I do believe that but there is something else going on.” She watched him sip his tea again, but he was looking decidedly less rumpled. “So tell me, if you’re so good, what do I want?”

“I can tell you what you don’t want. You don’t want to submit to me, or anyone ever, but I’m pretty high up on that list.”

“I’m not the submissive type.”

“No, you’re not but that’s not it. You’re scared of me, very sensibly so.”

“I’m getting better with the other guy.”

Bruce leaned forward a bit meeting her eyes. “I’m not talking about the Other Guy, who likes you by the way. I’m talking about me. You’ve read my file, you’ve read between the lines. You’ve seen violence and rage and pain and a genius to rival Tony’s. You wonder why I’m not in a secret lair dangling James Bond over a pit of piranhas, or living in a shack in the desert outside of Reno with a half dozen hookers buried in the backyard. And that’s why you’re scared of me, and that’s why I would never make a pass at you.” 

Natasha fought back a few chills, but he was right. He had all the makings of a super villain or serial killer. She was pretty sure the Hulk was actually what was responsible for keeping Bruce a good guy.

He smiled a sweet little smile. “Though for what it’s worth, and I’m merely offering this as a teammate, if you should ever need it, I give really amazingly good foot rubs.”

Before she could think up a suitable answer for that Bruce finished his tea with a quick swallow, folded up his paper, and left.

A few days later, she asked Pepper about the foot rubs. Pepper placed her hands on Natasha’s shoulders and looked her dead in the eye. “Listen to me very carefully, if Bruce Banner offers you a foot rub, do not hesitate, do not think about it, do not let a single doubt cross your mind, just say yes.”

A week later, Natasha found herself undercover. It didn’t happen that often any more since she had a bit of public exposure, but this crew wasn’t likely to look any further than her T and A factor. However, it did mean spending a week in the highest heels she could handle. By the time she got back to the tower, both her pinky toes had a strange tingle in them that wouldn’t go away, and she was limping on both feet. She saw Bruce lounging on the couch in the common room and remembered what Pepper had said.

She flopped down and put her feet right in Bruce’s lap. “I just spent a week in stilettos. Impress me.”

Bruce grinned, picked up her right foot, put his thumbs against the arch and pushed. “Jesus fuck!” Natasha cried out. It hurt, it really fucking hurt. It also felt absolutely amazing. The pain was wrapped in warm, velvet pleasure that travelled up her leg and into her spine. It stopped somewhere around her shoulder blades. Bruce kept rubbing, each move slow and strong. In less than a minute, she found herself making noises like a cheap Moscow streetwalker, cussing in a couple of different languages, and did not care in the slightest. The entire right side of her body was feeling weird, loose and tingly. She hated to admit it, but she was getting a bit turned on. What was happening to her foot was easily better than 99% of the sex she’d had.

Tony came out of the elevator just as she squealed at something Bruce did to the topside of her foot. “Hey, I thought we said no sex in the common room?” Tony shouted from the elevator. Natasha could not be bothered replying to that. 

“Just a foot rub.” Bruce called out. Natasha could feel her body twitch, and she clawed at the sofa. She was having a hard time opening her eyes. “Tasha, the metatarsophalangeal joint of your pinky toe is out of alignment and is pinching the nerves. I’m going to put it back, so brace yourself.” Bruce didn’t give her much time. She let out a shamefully girly squeak as she felt the pop and painful burn of blood and nerve impulses that once again had full access to that bit of her foot.

Bruce didn’t let up after that for some time. Her foot popped and clicked as he slid all the little bones back where they should be. He rubbed knots out of the top of her foot, and just when she felt well and truly wrecked, he picked up her left foot and started over. By the time, he was done she was gasping for air and had broken a fine sweat. 

He eased up and started carefully stroking each foot simultaneously with the lightest of touches. Natasha closed her eyes and fell asleep.

When she woke, the sun had gone down, and the lights were dim. There was a blanket over her body, and her feet were still in Bruce’s lap. Thor was sitting in the love seat reading something on his tablet. He absolutely loved the customized Stark Industries tablet Tony had set up for him. She went to say something but only a rough moan came out.

Bruce picked a large glass of water off the end table and held it out to her. It took a moment to remember how to use her hands and arms before she grabbed the water and chugged it down. “So, foot rubs.” Bruce smiled at her. “I take it Pepper gets these a lot.”

“As often as she needs.”

“No wonder she can wear those damn shoes of hers every day.” Natasha went to swing her legs off Bruce’s lap, but he put his hand down over her ankles.

“Oh, no. I just put half the bones in your feet back where they should be. You need to keep off them for the night so they can figure out how to be feet again.”

“I’m just going to my bedroom.” She felt absolutely wrecked.

“And that’s exactly where you should be going. Thor, would you carry Miss Romanoff to her bedroom?”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t need-” Natasha’s protest was cut short by Thor lifting her from the sofa like a princess. She could probably get Thor to put her down, but honestly her feet were feeling a little weird. It hardly seemed worth the effort. She did keep a slightly annoyed look on her face as she was tucked into bed. No one was supposed to carry her unless she was unconscious, and even that was a pathetic excuse.

Thor slid her into her bed, Bruce flipped the blankets up over her, and then patted her on the head. With a slightly cheeky smile on his face, he left. 

And since she was there already, Natasha decided that she might as well sleep.

When she awoke, nearly nine hours had passed. She stared at the ceiling in disbelief and asked Jarvis to repeat the time and date. She hadn’t slept nine hours straight in possibly her entire life. She threw back the blankets and placed her feet gingerly on the floor. They felt steady beneath her. She stood and took a few steps. There were no strange tingles or pains. Her weight felt perfectly balanced. She could even feel the fine grain of the wood floor under her toes. By the time she got out of the shower she was pretty sure she could do a barefoot mountain goat run up a rock face if she had to.

She ran into Pepper later that day. Pepper just smiled and gave her a wink. Natasha could now appreciate that Bruce had strong and dexterous hands, but that still didn’t explain how the entire tower ended up in his personal harem.

Just a few days later, the Avengers assembled for a pretty rough and tumble mission that involved going hand to hand with a lot of henchmen. Natasha took a couple of hits but nothing she couldn’t handle. Or she thought she could handle until she returned to the tower and a knife was rammed into her back. At least that’s what it felt like. She even reached behind herself to see if something was there but that just made it worse. Everything made it worse. She was having difficulty breathing, every breath felt like it was driving a knife under her shoulder blade.

She started to double over in pain. “Tasha, what’s wrong?” Clint asked, always the first to notice.

“I don’t know. It feels like there’s a knife under my right shoulder blade. It hurts to take a breath. Shit.”

Bruce, still covered in post-Hulk dirt, ran a quick hand over her back, barely touching. She grit her teeth. “Okay, let’s get you down to medical.”

Medical was in Bruce’s lab which was neatly segmented into four areas: research, production, Avengers only medical area, and sex dungeon. He led her to the medical section with Clint trailing and placed her in front of the radiation-free x-ray machine. It was a Banner/Stark invention that would revolutionize medicine if they could figure out how to make it for less than a million bucks and use less power than an average American household in a year.

He placed the dark goggles over her eyes. She could feel the warmth of the flash. By the time she took the goggles off, she was standing next to a projection of her own skeleton.

“Nothing looks broken.”

“Then why do I feel like I’m being stabbed in the back?” she hissed out.

“And why can she barely breathe?” Clint asked, helping her sit on the extra-large exam table. 

Bruce zoomed in to a spot where a few of her ribs met her spine. “There’s the culprit.” He turned the skeleton so she was looking at her own back.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“You basically slipped a rib out of joint. Number seven on your right side running right under your scapula. The tendons that hold your ribs in place back there aren’t very large or strong so the tip has slipped out of place and rotated slightly. It’s causing all the muscles in the area to spasm and that’s why you’re having trouble breathing. Honestly, I’m amazed it hasn’t happened before considering your fighting style. It must wreak havoc on your spine.”

“You can criticize my fighting style when I get to criticize yours. Now how do we fix this?”

“Option one: you lay down and let me practice some massage techniques I learned during a quick detour into Tibet. I should have everything into place in an hour or so. Option two: I give you some pain killers and muscle relaxants, wait half an hour for those to kick in, then I pop it back into place. Option three: I shove a needle full of pain killers and some steroids into the area, wait about a minute, then pop it back it.”

“Option three. I’m not scared of needles.” 

Bruce shook his head. He was more into full body alternative medicine. “Okay, get Clint to help you get your top off then lay face down.”

She waved Clint off until she was unable to pull her arms out of her sleeves. By the time, Clint had helped her strip down to her sports bra and lay on her front, she was in even more pain. “Banner, can you hurry this up?”

“As you wish.” There was the cold swipe of disinfectant and the pinch of a needle, but within a minute the whole area felt so much better. “Okay, brace yourself because even with that stuff, this is going to hurt a little.” Then Bruce very carefully put the heels of his hands along the edge of her spine and pushed. There was a pop, and a bolt of pain that snapped her teeth together. She took a breath and found that she actually could breathe.

“Oh, that’s so much better. Thanks Doc.” Natasha started to push herself up, but Bruce’s hand landed firmly between her shoulder blades. 

“Oh, no you don’t. Those spasms pulled plenty of other bits of you out of alignment as well. You’re lying there, I’m putting a hot pad on your back for a few minutes and then we’ll see what else needs to be fixed.”

“Bruce-“

“Why don’t you just rest, Tasha?” Clint suggested. “It’s been a long day and you were wincing some when we were sparing yesterday. You’ve got nowhere you need to be.” Clint gave her a hit of pure puppy dog eyes.

She sighed. “Okay, fine, whatever makes you two happy.”

By the time she was let out of medical three hours later, she was on the verge of falling asleep. She also felt like she’d had her spine removed and a whole fresh one put in.

It took two more months, three foot rubs, another spinal adjustment, a very frank talk with Pepper over a bottle of wine, a bout of winter loneliness, and a lack of even the tiniest move from Bruce for Natasha to finally give in. 

She spread her legs, and Bruce kissed up her thighs until sliding his tongue between her folds and along her clit. She moaned and let her head fall back. Bruce’s tongue was slow and steady against her. There were no surprise moves or sudden nips. He licked the right spot and hummed low in his throat. Natasha rapidly found herself swimming in soft rolling waves of pleasure that did not seem like they were ever going to end.

Her mind was starting to go nicely soft around the edges when Bruce picked up his speed ever so slightly - just enough to change gears. The warmth turned hot, and she began to press her hips up into his face. Her nipples began to ache and she felt her core begin to clench. Bruce pushed back licking faster and harder until he pressed two fingers into her and sucked hard. Natasha’s body arched against the bed as the orgasm snapped her head back and briefly blinded her to all else.

Bruce didn’t stop. He eased up a bit, went back to those long slow licks but didn’t stop for a second. Natasha found herself beginning to flop around, her limbs feeling heavy and useless. She was muttering to herself in Russian and didn’t care if Bruce understood one word. She managed to run her fingers through his hair. It was softer than she had expected.

After the first, it didn’t take long for the second orgasm to build, but this one hit with almost no warning, like an earthquake out of the blue. She was humming along nicely in sort of a holding state when Bruce slid two fingers back into her, pushed them up, and wiggled them slightly. Her eyes flew open, her legs curled up and she clenched down around Bruce’s two fingers for all she was worth. He slid them slowly in and out until she began to come down, but again his tongue didn’t stop moving.

She wondered if his jaw was aching and how fast he could get her to a third. She’d never had a third, not in a row. The occasional double happened, but it felt like Bruce was going for a triple play. She wanted nothing more than to be part of that. She rubbed at her nipples and tried to mumble encouragement but wasn’t even 100% sure what language she was speaking.

The third one crashed hard and long and just a bit painful. Bruce sucked hard on her clit, using his teeth a little while he worked three fingers into her. She pinched at her own nipples as her back arched and her thighs clenched. It was hard to breathe, hard to see, and absolutely impossible to even think. As the scream faded, Bruce finally pulled head back and looked at her. She pried open her eyes to look back.

His face was wet and his hair was a mess. Natasha couldn’t feel her legs. Without a word, Bruce stood, pulled the blankets up over her, gave her a kiss on the head and left.

Natasha lay there as her brain came back online. She realized what she’d done. Or what she’d been willing to do in between that second and third orgasm. She submitted, or at least had been willing to. Bruce could have tied her down, fucked her, spanked her, or done whatever the hell he wanted as long as he kept his tongue on her clit a little while longer.

And in that moment she knew she didn’t care. It was Bruce, fellow Avenger, friend, doctor, scientist, vegetarian, giant green rage monster who liked her, and as long as he wasn’t building an evil lair under a volcano, she was pretty damn sure that he would never hurt her.

She chuckled a little grimly to herself. It took a while, but Bruce got to check the last holdout Avenger off his list. Not that she believed he had a list, but here they were: the Avengers aka Bruce Banner’s harem. She wondered where he was now. The bulge in his pants had been obvious when he left but he acted like it had been just another foot rub. She guessed she’d have to see who was walking funny in the morning. 

The next day Bruce was acting like nothing had change between them, like he hadn’t given her probably the three best orgasms of her life. The only one who seemed to know anything, or acted like they did, was Thor who gave her a big grin. She pictured Bruce kissing Thor without cleaning off his face first and was slightly ashamed at the little thrill that ran through her. She supposed she might as well try to get over that now.

It was three days before she realized the benefits of being on Bruce Banner’s list of sex partners. It had been a bad day made worse by being the kind where she wasn’t actually allowed to hit anyone. She’d been forced to be polite for vast portions of the day. By the time she stomped up to her room, her back ached and she had the beginnings of a migraine coming on. She really hoped there would be a call to assemble so she could kill something.

Instead, there was a yellow sticky note on her door in Bruce’s rather elegant scrawl. 

_‘In The Bathroom’_

Natasha opened her door carefully. She checked for traps and then checked her own traps before progressing slowly to her bathroom. There was steam coming from the room. The bathtub was full and smelling of bergamot. There was a glass of white wine by the tub that still looked cold and churros with dark chocolate dipping sauce that still looked hot, and what looked like a couple of top-shelf pain pills sitting in a Chinese teacup. 

“Jarvis, did you let Bruce in here?”

“He may have implied that his entrance was a matter of medical importance.”

“Thank you, Jarvis.” She knew she should talk to Bruce about that. She had some nasty booby traps that he had somehow missed, but it wasn’t the safest thing for him to enter her room uninvited. 

She would save that conversation for later. The tub looked too inviting. She stripped and lowered herself in. Bruce must have slipped out only seconds ahead of her. She washed down the pills with the wine, which was still nicely chilled, and then dipped her finger into the chocolate.

She was half tempted to call Bruce, invite him down to share the chocolate sauce with her, but he had obviously set the whole thing up for her to enjoy on her own. And really who was she to argue with that?

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback, pretty, pretty please with sugar on top?


End file.
